Bring Fidelity Forward

Ora Research Letter on Digital Prototyping, Simulation & Analysis July 20, 2009

By Bruce Jenkins, CEO

Last time – business drivers for simulation investments in aerospace and defense. Today, a snapshot of current industry practice, and key next challenges being addressed by this practice-leading industry.

Pervasive and early… At leading aerospace/defense companies, use of simulation and analysis is pervasive throughout the product development process. In contrast to many other industries, best-practice aerospace and defense manufacturers bring simulation and functional modeling  to bear in the earliest stages of customer engagement to capture product requirements – more, to deliver value by aiding the customer with the process of requirements definition. Even before contract award, these companies begin using simulation and analysis for system- and product-level performance characterization, then continue using it post-award for product development and refinement into detail design.

“…to create sustainable growth, we’re addressing five drivers around product development: customer integration, architecture, developing the capabilities of our people, knowledge sharing, and reuse. Customer integration involves issues such as: how do we get systems engineering into closer relation with business development and the business as a whole?… As you move up the value chain and start to ask where the leverage is, simulation and modeling become increasingly significant. There’s a much increased focus today on modeling and simulation throughout our company…” – Aerospace/defense company D

Maximizing the technology’s business impact involves far more than simply buying today’s best point functionality and handing it off to the analyst or discipline lead. Instead, contemporary best practices focus on making more efficient use of existing resources – both software and engineering staff. No one we interviewed named software budgets as a constraint on product development’s ability to contribute to corporate business objectives – all identified time and human resources as limiting factors. New demands on product performance, mission complexity, product efficiency, total cost of ownership (TCO), new product cycle time and product development costs are driving companies to wring more value and output from their engineering resources.

…but working to achieve still more: “Bring fidelity forward” Notwithstanding the aerospace/defense industry’s leadership position in early and pervasive use of simulation, current initiatives to increase its business impact focus most often on enabling even faster and more revealing investigation of early product configurations and design alternatives:

“…the buzz phrase you hear being used is ‘bring fidelity forward.’ The idea is to bring in more and more detailed analysis of the structures, and to make that information available as early as possible in the design cycle.” – Aerospace/defense company A

“…the constraints [gating product development today] involve being able to develop product configurations and investigate them early in the cycle. The early, preliminary design and configuration of our products is a constraint in terms of schedule and cost. It’s been that way for some time, this is nothing incredibly new, but that up-front rapid configuration assessment is quite complex – and of course, the more sophisticated our products become, the more in-depth, multiple technologies need to be accommodated.” – Aerospace/defense company F

Next time Constraints on maximizing simulation's value

This research is excerpted from our white paper Strengthening Simulation's Business Impact: New Strategies in Aerospace & Defense. In this project we interviewed discipline leads and methods experts at major aerospace and defense OEMs and subcontractors around the world. Our investigation focused on business drivers for sustaining or increasing simulation investments, current state of industry practice, constraints on maximizing simulation’s value, and new strategies for overcoming these constraints. Request your copy of the white paper